Ho Chi Minh City contains over 3 million motorbikes and boy, does that make crossing the road an adventure! Like a scene from futuristic movie Tron, bikes come at you from all angles, like packets of unsprawled information at breakneck speed. The trick, they say, is to simply step into this seething mass of metal and rubber and hope for the best. Miraculously, it works. The gigantic roundabouts get a bit tricky however, as they seem to exponentially increase the number of possible angles from which you may get hit. I think I’m starting to get the hang of it now, though.
This morning we saw our first advertisement for a “non touristique trek” – sensational stuff. We were on our way to the War Remnants Museum, whose name has been changed from something like “US Imperialistic War Crimes Museum”, apparently so as not to offend American tourists. Not that we saw too many of those in the museum itself, whose contents were graphic, to say the least. Well worth visiting – as were the Cu Chi tunnels, my experiences of which are too complicated to write down here. I’ll just mention the fact that you could go to a rifle range there and shoot M16s, for $1 a bullet. It was for me the sickest form of tourism I’ve ever seen (and possibly the loudest).
In other news, as we have had no time to go to the Mekong Delta, I decided I’d make it up to Sarah by buying her a bootleg copy of Delta Goodrem’s Innocent Eyes. I look forward to many rotations of this classic disc as we wend our way up through Vietnam, on the Reunification Express. Tonight Yam Yam and I are off to Na Trang. Soft Sleeper!! Yam Yam !!!!!!
